Kings County Hospital in Brooklyn has the longest emergency room wait of city hospitals

By Reuven Blau

|New York Daily News|

Dec 02, 2018 | 12:55 PM

Patients at Kings County Hospital waited an average of 1 hour and 26 minutes to be seen by a doctor in 2017, according to records obtained via a Freedom of Information Law request. (Reuven Blau / New York Daily News)

“I thought she’d be seen by now,” said Logan while sitting in the emergency room last Wednesday. “It’s the first time I’ve come here. I don’t think I’m ever coming back.”

Patients need patience at the Brooklyn hospital where time sometimes seems to stand still. People with non-life-threatening ailments typically waited almost 90 minutes to see a doctor at Kings County.

The lengthy delay is the longest wait of any of the city’s 11 public hospitals operated by the cash-strapped NYC Health + Hospitals Corp.

Kings County, the borough’s main level-1 trauma center, serves some of Brooklyn’s poorest residents. Many lack insurance and rely on Medicare or Medicaid.

“It’s so evident that the city has to invest in more doctors and nurses at these overburdened hospitals,” said City Councilwoman Carlina Rivera, chairwoman of the Committee on Hospitals.

In some Kings County cases, the patient’s wait can stretch to five or six hours.

“It don’t make no sense,” said Logan.

Milayo Negesti, 42, right, and her son, Duatihuti Doomes, 9, waited together for over four hours. (Reuven Blau / New York Daily News)

Fuming in the seat beside Logan sat Milayo Negesti, 42, who arrived suffering with pain from a lump in her breast. Her wait was already at four hours.

“The pain is radiating down my arm,” she said. “I’ve never had to wait here this long. It’s absurd.”

Yet according to city records, the emergency room numbers actually improved at Kings County Hospital between 2013 and 2017.

The average wait time there dropped from 1 hour and 54 minutes in 2013 to 1 hour and 26 minutes last year, according to data obtained via a Freedom of Information Law request.

“Before it used to be worse,” agreed patient Paul Tirone, 58, who waited for two hours with his wife for her foot ailment.

The trend reversed in the early part of 2018, with the wait times again going up.

Patients were left to stew in the waiting room for an average of an hour and 43 minutes in January, February and March this year, department statistics reveal.

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Medical personnel at the hospital are often overwhelmed by trauma cases or other serious medical emergencies — delaying the less-pressing cases, according to staffers at the facility.

The hospital actually became so busy that it was forced to go on diversion and direct EMS to temporarily send patients to other hospitals 28 times in 2017.

That’s actually down from the 50 such times in 2016.

The diversion call is typically tied to a mass casualty event like a bus accident or a high volume of patients with an infectious disease during peak flu season.

The top patient diagnosis was “chest pain” with 3,459 visits in 2017 and 2018 so far. The second most prevalent ailment was “lower back pain” with 3,338 visits, and “acute respiratory infection” was third with 3,263 visits.

The hospital’s history of extensive wait times in nothing new. In 2008, a 49-year-old woman died on the floor of the psychiatric emergency room after waiting more than 24 hours for help.

Hospital officials then reorganized parts of the emergency department to speed up patient flow.

Over the past few months, Health + Hospitals has opened two ExpressCare clinics to provide “fast access to high-quality, urgent care and reduce emergency department wait times.”

They cost between $1.5 and $2 million to construct and are located at Lincoln Hospital in The Bronx and Elmhurst Hospital in Queens.

The idea is to bring the clinics to each of the agency’s 11 hospitals.

City officials expect to begin construction of a Kings County Hospital express clinic next year.

The clinics handle non-emergency cases like people suffering from minor ailments such as the flu, skin rashes, small cuts, and infections. Triage nurses at the ERs will be able to transfer patients with less serious issues to the clinics. That is expected to vastly reduce wait times for others in the ER.

If necessary, patients at the express clinics will be connected with primary care physicians.

Editor’s note: This story initially incorrectly indicated no ExpressCare clinics were yet open and misstated their cost and size.